Tuesday, 6 September 2016

Gillian Lynne - Choreographing Cats

Gillian Lynne never wanted to
choreograph Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber's now thirty-five year old
musical adaptation of T.S. Eliot's poetic suite, Old Possum's Book of
Practical Cats. As an internationally renowned choreographer who
worked regularly with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and whose career
as a dancer had seen her playing Sleeping Beauty at Sadler's Wells
thirty years earlier, she was hardly struggling for work. Besides
which, she'd just got married to actor Peter Land, a man twenty-seven
years her junior, and had other things on her mind.

As a revamped Cats arrives into Glasgow
next week for its latest tour following a West End revival, Lynne is
glad she said yes to Lloyd Webber, and has remained involved with the
show to this day.

“It's like my child,” says Lynne,
who is now a somewhat hard-to-credit ninety years old. “It's
wonderful. The kids get better every time. They sing better. They
dance better, and the show still has the three key elements that make
it work.”

Which are?

“Sensuality, sensitivity and
sexuality,” Lynne says. “Nowadays life has changed so radically
with the advent of the iPhone and everything else, with everyone just
looking into screens, that sometimes these things are hard to
achieve, but it's a wonderful little company for this production.
I've done most of them, and this lot have a very special spark.”

Lynne began dancing aged thirteen, and
pursued a long career onstage in the West End and in film, where she
appeared opposite Errol Flynn in The Master of Ballantrae. Lynne
moved into choreography and directing, working with the Royal
Shakespeare Company, English National Opera. Prior to Cats she even
worked on seminal TV series, The Muppet Show. Today, however, it is
Cats that she is best known for, a show which led her to work with
Lloyd Webber again on both The Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of
Love. As proved to be the case, resistance to Cats was futile even as
Lynne's presence possibly drove the tone of the show.

“Cameron Mackintosh always wanted me
to do it from the start,” she remembers of the then young producer,
“but Andrew wanted someone else to do it who he thought would be a
safe pair of hands. I was rehearsing Oklahoma in Bristol when I got a
phone call from my agent, who said I had to go to London straight
away to meet Andrew Lloyd Webber. I said, I haven't, you know,
because I'd just got married. That's why the show's so sexy, because
there's all of our sex in it.”

Somehow Lynne managed to find the time
to visit Lloyd Webber at his country house in Newbury

“He played it on the piano all the
way through,” says Lynne, “and it turned me on instantly. Trevor
Nunn had just done four shows with me at Stratford, so our team fell
into place quite naturally.”

For those of a certain age, watching
Cats some thirty-five on, the show's junkyard setting designed by
John Napier and role-call of back-alley hipsters can't help but
recall 1960s cartoon Top Cat reinvented for stage school kids, with
TC's hard-boiled Runyonesque patois exchanged in favour of T.S.
Eliot's equally baroque poetics. Transposed into songs such as the
show's breakout number, Memory, such seemingly unlikely material made
Cats a sensation. The original production ran in London for
twenty-one years in London and eighteen on Broadway, breaking records
for both along the way.

Back in 1981, however, Cats didn't seem
such a safe bet. Following Lloyd Webber's success with lyricist Tim
Rice on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ
Superstar and Evita, this was set to be his first full musical since
the partnership had broken up. With the Eliot estate decreeing that
not a word of the original poems be changed, there was no lyricist at
all on board, although there were some lyrical contributions from
director Trevor Nunn and Richard Stilgoe.

“It was such a clever idea,” she
says. “It was the first sung-through musical without any dialogue,
and when we started on it there was no book, no characters, and
everyone was against it. John would work on his wonderful set, and we
all worked quite separately, so how it became the thing it did was a
miracle.”

When Judi Dench, who was set to play
ageing feline Grizabella, was forced to
pull out of the show through injury, Elaine Paige stepped into her
catsuit at the last minute, with the incident adding to the company's
collective stress.

“Even at the previews we were shit
scared,” says Lynne. “We didn't have all the money for it, and
everyone thought we were raving mad. We were so nervous, and the
minute it started we rushed to the bar to have a stiff drink. Then we
started hearing this rapturous applause, and we never realised
we could do all these things until we had that first reaction, I
swear to God.”

Lynne describes what followed Cats'
Olivier and Tony winning runs as “a crazy time,” with back to
back stints in Vienna, Hamburg and Paris, that continued with runs in
Berlin, Madrid, Australia and North Korea.

When the show was revived on the West
End in 2014, it wasn't certain whether Cats had used up all of its
nine lives or not.

“We didn't know what people would
think now,” says Lynne, “or if it would be a success or not, but
very pleasantly it was.”

There have been changes for the current
version of Cats. One song has been dropped, while Rum Tum Tugger's
soliloquy, delivered by Marcquelle Ward
with pimp-rolling aplomb, has been re-arranged and transformed into a
rap, complete with body-popping gymnastics accompanying him.

It should perhaps be noted here that in
the year Cats premiered, Grandmaster Flash and an entire crew of
underground DJs had just rapped and scratched their way from
underground New York block parties and into the radio friendly
mainstream. That it's taken three and a half decades for rap to
infiltrate Cats is telling about where Lloyd Webber, Nunn and co's
heads were, and indeed weren't at back then. And, while no-one
onstage at least admits to it, you get the impression that it's
addition is not exactly relished by those in the spotlight. Lynne,
for one, would have preferred changes elsewhere.”

“I was begging Andrew to write a new
number for Macavity” she says flatly, “but he didn't. I've always
been open to change, and I really keep my beady eye on it.”

Which brings Lynne, who was made a Dame
three years ago, back to what she sees as the driving force behind
Cats.

“The sexuality has got to be there,”
she says, “just as the sensuality and the sensitivity has to be
there, and I think it has all that. I was able to do things onstage
with the kids that I wouldn't have been able to do if they were in
ordinary clothes. I think people are thrilled to see their bodies
move as they do.”

She pauses for effect.

“It's without shyness,” she says.
“It's dangerous.”

Beyond the danger, Lynne sees something
softer there too.

“I'm an old romantic,” she says. “I
don't think you can have life without romance, but because of the
iPhone, I wonder where romance is going to go. So I think it's good
that Cats unites people in the way that it does, and I think it might
be useful in that way, even though people don't realise it. It's
uninhibited in every way, and is so different from life, and yet, it
is life.”

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, The Quietus, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia and The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) and Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), and co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? and Time Out Edinburgh Guide. Neil has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival and Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on BBC and independent radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, and has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.